Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Staunton, September 30 – The Russian
general staff has announced that it will draft young men from Chechnya this
fall for the first time in 20 years and will begin drafting that cohort from
occupied Crimea and Sevastopol next spring, an indication of just how hard
Moscow is having to work to compensate for demographic shortfalls among ethnic
Russians.

Today, the Russian general staff
said it would draft 154,100 people in the upcoming fall draft, a slight
increase over the 153,200 it drafted last spring, but the new draft will be
different: Moscow said it plans to draft 500 young men from Chechnya, the first
time it has done so since Soviet times (echo.msk.ru/news/1409550-echo.html).

The decision to resume drafting
young men in the North Caucasus reflects in the first instance Moscow’s need to
find more manpower at a time when the number of draft-age ethnic Russians is
declining, even if it means taking in men many commanders would prefer not to
have in their units lest they cause trouble in the ranks or subsequently use
the military skills they acquire against Russian forces.

But it also reflects pressure from
North Caucasus leaders. On the one hand, they want the military to resume the
draft there in order to cut unemployment among the young, a status that they
say often makes such people more susceptible to the arguments of the militants,
and to give these young men the ability to get jobs in the police.

And on the other, these leaders
point out, Moscow’s failure to draft in the North Caucasus in recent years has
been an even greater recruiting tool for the militants: The latter point out
that by not drafting North Caucasians, the Russian government is saying that it
doesn’t view them as full citizens. In that event, the militants say, why not
struggle against Moscow?

The extension of the draft to Crimea and
Sevastopol presents another set of problems.While some ethnic Russians there may be quite willing to serve in the
Russian military, many Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars will certainly view this
as the most unwelcome extension of Russian power yet and quite possibly resist.

Staunton, September 26 – At a time
when Moscow is cutting spending on education and health and in an indication of
the importance the Kremlin places on propaganda, the Russian government is
going to increase the amount of money it will give to the television channel “Russia
Today” next year by 41 percent over what it had announced earlier.

Andrey
Mayboroda, the director of the Moscow Center for Political Research, commented
to the paper that “it is obvious that the state is generously increasing its
spending only on the propaganda machine directed at the foreign consumer. In
Russia, the zombification of the population has been going on for a long time
and successfully. Large additional cash infusions aren’t needed.”

But,
he said, in Moscow’s judgment, Russian broadcasting abroad “has not had the
desired impact.”Unfortunately for those
behind this budgetary move, “an attempt to achieve the necessary result by
increasing spending for the purchase of new ‘furniture’ without changing ‘the
girls’ [who host the station] is condemned to failure in advance.”

What
is “sad” about this, Mayborda added, is that those who are having to pay for
this doomed project are not those who have ordered it but rather “the ordinary
Russian taxpayer.”

Staunton, September 30 – Many Russians
now believe that everyone in the world hates them and wishes their country ill,
but that is not the case, Ruslan Gorevoy argues in “Novaya Versiya.”Russia and Russians even now have many
friends: they just aren’t in the places where they were in Soviet times.

In the current issue of that weekly,
the Moscow commentator says that it is time to stop repeating Alexander III’s
famous dictum that Russia has “only two true allies, its army and its fleet”
and recognize that Russia and Russians do have friends beyond the borders of
the Russian Federation (versia.ru/articles/2014/sep/29/odinnadtsat_druzey_putina).

There are in fact a lot of them,
somewhat fewer politicians than in the past but somewhat more entrepreneurs and
“those whom it is customary to call the intellectual elite,” Gorevoy continues.
And then he provides a survey of Russia’s friends at the level of countries,
then at the level of political movements, and finally at the level of
individuals.

All Russians know that the US is the
main enemy, followed by Great Britain and then Poland, three countries which
are “prepared to make friends with anyone as long as they are against Russia.”But there are other countries in the world,
and not all of them follow the American line.

Before the Ukrainian crisis, Gorevoy
says, the Pew Research Center conducted a poll in several dozen countries about
popular attitudes toward Russia. Most opposed to Russia were Japan, Jordan,
Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Germany and France. Most favorably disposed were Greece,
South Korea, Ghana, Kenya, Malaysia, India and Indonesia.

Some of those attitudes have shifted
since that time, Gorevoy continues, but many have remained in the same camps.
Now, Russia’s “most probable potential allies are such countries as Vietnam,
Bangladesh, Thailand, and the Philippines,” while the least likely partners are
Poland, Italy, Spain and the United States.

Many Russians are struck or confused
by the fact that those who were sympathetic to Moscow in the past no longer
are, but they need to remember that “those who sympathized with us in the past
loved not Russia but communism,” and with the end of communism has come in most
cases the end of such positive feelings.

That is not so much as many think
because the USSR spent more than Russia does on gaining the support of such
people, Gorevoy argues, but rather because communist ideology was attractive to
many in the West who are nonetheless put off by Russian nationalism.

He cites Sergey Markov, a Moscow commentator,
on this point.Arguing that no one
should confuse attachment to communism and attachment to Russia, he says that “when
our country rejected communist ideology, all those who shared the ideas of Marx
and Lenin immediately ceased to sympathize with it.”

There
is not the slightest chance, he says, that the Rosenbergs would have “risked
their lives” to hand over the plans for the atomic bomb to the Russian special
services as opposed to the Soviet agencies as they did.

Russia
also benefits from the friendships Vladimir Putin has with certain Western
politicians, including Gerhard Schroeder of Germany and Silvio Berlusconi of
Italy and from support of nationalist political parties in Europe who oppose
the EU and who are seek to destroy it from within. He cites the recent article
of Mitchell Orenstein in “Foreign Policy” on this point.

These
parties include the French National Front, the Hungarian Jobbiks, the Bulgarian
Attack parliamentary group, the Austrian Peoples Party, the Flemmish Interest
Party of Belgium, the Italian ‘Forward, Italy” and Northern League parties, and
the Polish Self Defense party, all of which have parliamentary representation
and all of which are “friends of Russia.”

Many
Western businessmen are also favorably inclined toward Russia, largely if not
exclusively because of their interest in making money there, Gorevoy argues.
But more intriguing are the positive relations of actors, film stars, and the
like who often express sympathy for Russia without gaining anything – except in
the case of Gerard Depardieu.

Among
these people are Helen Mirren, Mickey Rourke and Steven Siegel.Mirren is of Russian background, but the
other two are not. How do they explain Russia’s attraction to them? Rourke says
that Russia attracts him because it “can stand up against everyone and win,”
and Siegel says he “understands
Russian people” better than he understands Americans and “feels himself art of
Russian life and Russian culture.”

At the end of his article, Gorevoy
offers quotations from three prominent political commentators who are also very
much “friends of Russia;” Alexander Rahr of Germany, Stephen Cohen of the
United States, and Dmitry Trenin, the director of the Moscow Carnegie Center.

Staunton, September 30 -- Following
the Crimean Anschluss, Russians have stopped focusing their anger on Nikita
Khrushchev, who transferred Crimea from the RSFSR to Ukraine, as a primary source
of their problems with Ukrainians and shifted attention to the role Vladimir Lenin
and Joseph Stalin played in creating the current tensions between the two
nations.

Some Russians, largely out of
ignorance, Ilya Lazarenko writes in a commentary on Rufabula.com, believe that “Lenin
created Ukraine, added Kharkiv to it, and so on.”But such views arise from the “one
grandmother said to another” school of historical interpretation and need to be
fought (rufabula.com/author/ilya-lazarenko/116).

The facts, the Ukrainian commentator
continues, are these, “the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) appeared
as a result of the Ukrainian Peoples Republic (UNR),” had borders which “corresponded
with the borders” of that earlier state, and was demarcated according to regins
which were “predominantly” Ukrainian in population.

But those historical realities were
overwhelmed in the minds of many Russians by government propaganda beginning a
year or so ago which claimed, among other falsehoods, that “Lenin was the creator
of Ukraine,” a claim that not only denigrated the Ukrainians as a nation but implied
that Lenin had made a mistake and that Moscow must “correct” it.

The events of 1917 and the years
following are complicated but not that difficult to understand, Lazarenko says.
Two days after Nicholas II abdicated, the Ukrainian Central Rada was set up in
Kyiv as a coordinating council for the Ukrainian national movement which at
that time was pressing for the autonomy of Ukraine within a Russian federal
state.

Even when the Bolsheviks ceased power in
November 1917, Kyiv did not immediately declare independence because it was
placing its faith in the Constituent Assembly. But even before the Bolsheviks
suppressed that body, they issued an ultimatum to Kyiv to subordinate itself to
their regime, something the Ukrainians rejected.

Even then, however, Kyiv did not declare
its independence, but its refusal to recognize the Bolshevik regime led a group
of Bolshevik deputies of the All-Ukraine Congress of Soviets to go to Kharkiv
where they proclaimed what was in effect a marionette state, the Ukrainian
Peoples Republic of Soviets.

When
Lenin dissolved the Constituent Assembly, Lazarenko continues, “the legitimacy
of statehood on the territory of the former Russian Empire completely broke
down.” And as a result, the Ukrainian Peoples Republic declared its
independence.Although later destroyed
by the forces of the Bolshevik regime, it continued to exist de jure in the emigration until 1992.

That summary should make it clear, he
says, that “the USSR was not established by the Bolsheviks from nothing” as
some Russians think, “but was the result of the recognition of the right of
Ukrainians to self-determination under the pressure of objective circumstances
-- a strong Ukrainian national movement and a Ukrainian statehood recognized
even before the Bolsheviks.”

More intriguing are Russian commentaries
about Stalin’s role in creating the current situation in Ukraine as a result of
his decision to annex Western Ukraine, something that became possible as a
result of his alliance with Hitler and invasion of Poland but that, as many
Western specialists have pointed out, has had serious consequences for Ukraine
and Moscow ever since.

In an article on the Russian nationalist
site Stoletie.ru, Mikhail Slobodskoy argues that by annexing Western Ukraine,
the Soviet leadership allowed into the USSR “a Trojan horse” that ultimately
played a key role in the destruction of the USSR and the radicalization of
Ukrainian nationalism (stoletie.ru/territoriya_istorii/zapadenskij_trojanskij_kon_628.htm).

“The events in 1939 developed so
rapidly,” he says, “that the Soviet leadership apparently then simply was not
able or not able correctly to calculate all the negative consequecnes connected
with the unification of Western Ukraine to the USSR,” given that the different
historical experiences of Ukrainians there who were now to be tied to Soviet
Ukraine.

It is very likely, Slobodskoy says,
that “the leadership of the USSR” – his euphemism for Stalin – “simply did not
have any other geopolitical possibility” and may have been driven by a desire
for “the triumph of historical justice” by the inclusion of lands that in most
cases had been part of the Russian Empire.

“But by including Western Ukraine within
the country, the leadership of the USSR by its own hands allowed in a unique ‘Trojan
horse,’ which was absolutely alien socially and historically on what was then
the common territory” of the Ukrainian SSR and of the USSR as a whole.

Moscow first encountered this
reality when following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, people from
Western Ukraine were among the first to join the German forces to fight the
Soviet ones. But even after the war and until at least 1953, Western Ukrainians
continued their armed resistance to Soviet power.

But the destructive influence of the
Western Ukrainians re-emerged with the beginning of perestroika, Slobodskoy
continues, during the discussion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, something
which “literally” became a Pandora’s box for the USSR.“The unification of Galicia to the USSR on the
whole played a negative role in the fate of the entire former Ukrainian SSR
and, as we see, Russia” as well, he says.

Staunton, September 30 – Concerned
that Moscow might engineer a regime change in Belarus as a follow on to its
actions in Ukraine, Alyaksandr Lukashenka has been purging pro-Russian
officials from his regime – but in a very quiet way lest he provoke Moscow as a
result, according to “Nasha Niva.”

The latest example of this, “Nasha
Niva” says, is the removal of Lev Krishtapovich as deputy director of the
Information-Analytic Center of the presidential administration.Without any announcement at all, his name
simply has ceased to appear among its leaders in new publications.

At the age of 65, Krishtapovich
might have retired, but that is not what has happened. Instead, he is now in
charge of the scientific-research department of the Belarusian State University
of Culture, a distinctly less important and less influential post.

In recent years, he had been one of the
most prominent exponents of what is sometimes referred to as “West Russism,”
the notion that Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians are a single ethnos rather
than separate nations. Several of his books pushed that idea, including one
with the provocative title “Belarus and Russia: A Historiosophical and Civilizational
Unity.”

But he was even
more famous or infamous for his dismissive comments about Belarusian history,
his opposition to Mensk’s program to preserve architectural monuments in
Belarus, and his having received, last year from Russian President Vladimir
Putin, the Russian Order of Friendship.”

Indeed, it is
even possible that that action by Putin triggered his removal, the Belarusian
paper implied. If so, Kristapovich's dismissal is even more significant as an indication
of Lukashenka’s fears and his moves to defend himself and his country from
Moscow.

Monday, September 29, 2014

Staunton, September 29 – Archbishop Thomas
Gullickson, the apostolic nuncio in Kyiv, has denounced Moscow for conduct “an
undeclared war” against Ukraine that has destabilized the situation of that
neighboring state. This follows his earlier call for the West to “more
decisively intervene” to resolve the Ukrainian crisis.

At the same time, Gullickson, 64 and
born in the United States, said that in addition to Moscow, Ukraine has “another
enemy, its own elite.”And he called on
religious organizations in Ukraine to “more objectively analyze” what is going
on rather than seek to win points for themselves by speaking out one way or another
(ng.ru/faith/2014-09-26/2_pope.html).

The nuncio made these points at a
meeting of Aid to the Church in Need organization. He said that Ukraine’s
destabilization had “to a significant degree” occurred because of the actions
of its earlier “criminal oligarchy” but had been intensified by “Russian aggression
against its territorial integrity and sovereignty.”

“Even if Moscow’s intervention ended
tomorrow,” the archbishop said, “Ukraine besides the rehabilitation of the east
would have to deal with some extraordinary challenges in order to escape from
corruption and build a just society.”

The nuncio added that in his view, “the
military actions in Ukraine directly touch on the Catholic Church because of ‘the
essential harm’ inflicted on its churches” and because some Catholics “have
been forced to leave the territory of Ukraine which has been ‘occupied’ by
Russia.”

Not surprisingly, the Moscow
Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church does not agree with the papal
nuncio, but its reaction so far has been remarkably measured compared to many
of its other statements about Ukrainian developments.

Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, the
head of the synod’s department for relations between the church and society,
said Moscow has heard all this before from those who “stand on one side in a
civil conflict – and this is precisely one of those” even though on each side
of the conflict there are people with differing views on the future of Ukraine,
Europe and the world.

“We
would like to hope,” he said, “that all religious communities in Europe, in the
world, in Ukraine and in Russia will be able to take into consideration the
feelings, aspirations and interests of people who are on both sides of the
conflict in the way that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow
Patriarchate is doing.”

Staunton, September 29 – The 100,000-strong
Muslim community of Kaliningrad is running out of options in the Russian legal
system to secure land for the construction of a mosque in that Russian exclave
and consequently will now appeal to the European Court of Human Rights,
according to their lawyer Dagir Khasavov.

Up to now, Khisamov said, he and his
fellow Muslim leaders have worked to restrain their parishioners, but he told
Newkaliningrad.ru, “you will understand that this is not our question alone.
There are more than 100,000 Muslims here, and each has a stone in his heart”
because there is no mosque.

“When things explode as they will we
cannot say,” he continued, “and we will continue to read homilies about the
friendship of the peoples, but if each holds a stone in his heart, then it is
difficult to restrain” the faithful. And by implication, the longer the Russian
authorities deny the Muslims their rights, the harder that is going to be.

The Kaliningrad mosque case has been
a complicated one, but at each stage, the Muslims have lost. Their lawyer says
that they are going through the motions of a final appeal to the Russian
Supreme Court but “our faith in the Russian court system has been reduced to a
minimum … Muslims are hostages of the intolerance of the region’s Orthodox
leadership.”

In
their appeal to the Kremlin leader, they also asked him to “remove from office
those who are sowing hostility between the two confessions and between the
fraternal peoples of Russia.” Apparently, Putin has not done anything in
response, and now the situation in Kaliningrad may be on the brink of an
explosion few saw coming.

Staunton, September 29 – The demolition
of the statue of Lenin in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv has attracted
international attention, with some seeing this as a provocation by one or another
side in the war in Ukraine and others viewing it as an indication of the
maturation of the Ukrainian revolution and a sign of the final divorce of
Ukraine from Russia.

In other former Soviet bloc
countries and former Soviet republics, there are even more, although their
numbers continue to decline as more people learn about the crimes Lenin
committed and especially as religious leaders focus on his efforts to destroy
religion and extirpate Russian national traditions.

But there is one discernable pattern
about the demise of Lenin statues: When the Soviet system was viewed as an
occupation rather than an organic part of national history, such as the Eastern
European countries and the formerly occupied Baltic states, there are very few
Lenins left and these countries have made the greatest progress toward
democracy and freedom.

Where statues of Lenin continue to
be viewed as an integral part of the national experience either to be tolerated
or celebrated depending upon the country involved, with more Russians than
anyone else prepared to view the founder of the Soviet state as a hero now,
often for the un-Leninist reason that he kept the Russian empire from disintegrating
in 1917.

And in these countries, there has
been much less progress toward democracy and freedom and must less progress toward
a modern economy, with economic growth far more anemic except in those which
have significant amounts of natural resources that they can sell to other
countries.

Obviously, Lenin statues are a
symptom rather than a cause of this pattern, but the demise of the large on in
Kharkiv suggests three conclusions which it would be well for everyone to keep
in mind going forward:

First, except for a very few true
communists, Lenin has become the symbol of the Russian empire rather than of
any radical social transformation.Both
those who are taking down statues of him, such as the Ukrainians, and those who
oppose them, including many in Moscow, clearly view him in this way.

Second, the Lenin statues, which
were part of a broader Lenin cult, were in fact totems of a terrorist
transformed into a god and thus one of the clearest indications of just how
evil the Soviet system was and how great a burden it still places on the
peoples who were subject to its crimes.

And third, the fight over the
statues of Lenin 23 years after the USSR disappeared and communists declared
themselves to be something else shows how unwilling the West was to face up to
the evil of that system and to demand that the losers of the cold war
de-communize themselves as part of the settlement.

Instead in the name of not offending
their new "partners," costing themselves access to new markets, and putting
additional burdens on themselves to complete the job of the cold war, Western
leaders proclaimed victory and ignored the ways in which some parts of
the Soviet inheritance could haunt the world if they did nothing.

The Ukrainians won a victory in that
struggle by taking down the statue of Lenin in Kharkiv. At the very least, they
have helped to separate themselves still more from what Ronald Reagan properly
called “the evil empire.”Their victory
should be celebrated and others encouraged to emulate it rather than be second
guessed by those who fear offending Moscow.

Staunton, September 29 – Despite the
propaganda victories Moscow has reaped from the presence of refugees from
Ukraine in Russia and even the profits some Russian businesses have made from
them (centrasia.ru/news.php?st=1411935840),
45 percent of Russians now say the refugees should be sent back as soon as conditions
permit, according to a new VTsIOM poll.

Even more striking, seven percent of
Russians surveyed say that the refugees should be sent back as fast as possible
rather than waiting until conditions in the eastern portions of Ukraine from
which the refugees fled stabilizes.

Those Russians who have had direct
contact with refugees appear less sympathetic to them than do others lacking
such experiences. Thus, 66 percent of Russians who haven’t seen any refugees in
their cities favor simplified procedures for the refugees to gain Russian
citizenship. Of those who have had such contact, only 41 percent back that
idea.

Indeed, the larger the influx of
refugees, the more opposed Russians are to allowing them to gain citizenship
and stay.Among Russians who have
observed a large number of refugees in their regions, 48 percent oppose
simplified citizenship procedures, the VTsIOM poll found. Most of those
surveyed report that there are at least some refugees in their regions or
cities, but almost one in five – 18 percent – say that there aren’t any at all.

Two-thirds of
the sample say that Russia is today providing refugees from Ukraine “all the
necessary help, but a quarter – 24 percent – say that it is giving them too
much. Those who feel that way are most often found among those with lower
incomes (30 percent) and in places where there are a large number of refugees
(28 percent).

Only one in 25 –
four percent – said that Russia isn’t doing enough for the refugees from the
war zone.

On the one
hand, these results are certainly not surprising: such refugee fatigue has
affected many people around the world. But on the other, they must be worrisome
to the Kremlin because popular attitudes about the refugees may be a more
accurate measure of how Russians feel about the war.

And to the
extent that Russians are less and less willing to support the refugees, such
attitudes may put some pressure on Moscow to try to arrange things so that the
refugees can return home rather than remain where they are now and become a
trigger for popular anger at the Kremlin.

Staunton, September 29 – Vladimir Putin’s
decision to end direct elections for mayors in the name of increasing central
control will in fact have the opposite effect, Roman Revunov says, because it
will allow governors to amass unprecedented power and be in a position to challenge
Moscow or even lead their regions out of the Russian Federation.

In a commentary on Kasparov.ru
today, the Novocherkassk blogger argues that those who assume that Putin can
control the situation in every case by removing any governors before they are
in a position to act in this way are wrong because doing so could trigger even
more instability in key locations (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=54291E9C5FADD).

According to Revunov, “besides everything
else, direct elections of mayors defends the regions from the extraordinary
concentration of power in the hands of the governor,” something that in Russian
conditions is “a very important function” and one that Putin will override only
at peril to himself and the country as a whole.

“This week in Russia, “there is
becoming less democracy and more separatism,” Revunov says, but from an
unexpected source: Moscow is pushing the regions to end the direct election of
mayors lest someone from the opposition win and instead seeking to have the
mayors chosen in effect by the regional governors.

That may seem a small change given
that Putin has already eliminated the direct election of the heads of
federation subjects, and as long as the center had money flowing in from the
sale of oil and gas abroad, it may have been now more than that, Revunov says.
But now the situation has changed, the money has run out, and that is affecting
regional power arrangements.

Here is why that is the case, the
Novocherkassk writer continues.“Let us
imagine a situation in which a certain influential corporation” is able to “purchase”
from the Kremlin a governorship for “some wealthy oil and gas region or some
poor but border region or indeed in any of them.”

Under the new system which Putin is
pushing, “approximately a year or 18 months later, the new baron will be able
to replace the mayors of significant municipalities with his own people.”And having done so, the question will arise: “who
really will run the province of our happy kingdom – the little father tsar or
the governor in his name?”

It seems fairly clear, Revunov says,
that it will be the governor. After all, “Moscow is far away and the governor
is here with all his own people.”

To the extent that is true, he continues, “the
elimination of direct elections in favor of the appointment of mayors
represents a very suitable instrument for the formation of a system of personal
power of governors in the regions and as a result a reduction of their loyalty
to the central government.”

Such a governor may decide that he has more to gain from
building ties with foreign states such as Japan or China than for maintaining
them with Moscow, especially if they are able to provide him with more money
than the central Russian government can.

Some people assume that Putin will be able to sense this
sufficiently well in advance to be able to declare that the governor has lost
his trust and then remove him, but in the worst case, “will the regional baron
allow himself to be removed?” Or might he seek “protection” from “our Chinese
partners” or someone else?

As the center’s ability to redistribute resources
declines because the amount of resources at its command falls, giving regional
leaders the power to appoint mayors “is a very risky step,” Revunov says,
especially at a time when loyalty ends when the money does and when “everything
has become a question of price.”

Sunday, September 28, 2014

Staunton, September 28 – Just as it
did in Ukraine, Moscow is preparing again to play the citizenship card in
Estonia and Latvia, muddying the waters as to who is “a Russian” and who is
thus part of Vladimir Putin’s “Russian world” and worthy of Moscow’s defense
whether any of them want that “defense” or not.

In the case of Ukraine, the Russian
government at various points over the last six months has included in what
Putin calls “the Russian world” “citizens of the Russian Federation,” “ethnic
Russians regardless of citizenship,” “Russian speakers,” and those who identify
with Russia regardless of their ethnicity, language, or citizenship.

Now as it steps up the pressure
against the Baltic countries, Moscow is again using a highly elastic definition
of who is part of the Russian world and who is not, something that must be
understood and acknowledged if the Baltic countries and their supporters are
going to be in a position to turn back Moscow’s efforts to subvert, destabilize
and otherwise move against them.

An article by Nadezhda Yermolayeva
in “Rossiiskaya gazeta” last week with the headline “Residents of Latvia are
taking Russian citizenship in great numbers” provides both an indication of the
direction the Russian government is moving and also the flexible way it is
defining who is part of Putin’s “Russian world” (rg.ru/2014/09/24/grajdanstvo-site-anons.html).

But even more valuable, although
this was certainly not Yermolayeva’s intent, the article also provides
important guidance on what the Baltic governments and their supporters in
Europe may now face and should do lest the Kremlin leader succeed in so
muddying the waters that many do not respond to his aggression until what may
be too late.

According to Yermolayeva, “every 50th
resident of Latvia is a citizen of Russia,” and their number is “growing from
year to year.”And she says that
specialists say that citizens of Latvia as well as non-citizens are now taking
Russian citizenship, something that one of her contacts said “the Latvian authorities
ought to be thinking about.”

Some are doing so for purely economic
reasons: the retirement age in Latvia rising and by changing citizenship some
people can get pensions sooner. But more is involved than that, she suggests,
noting that the number of people taking Russian citizenship now is especially
large in Latgale, “the easternmost and poorest region” of the country.

According to the statistics Yermolayeva
gives, 13 percent of the population of Latvia are not citizens of that country.
That amounts to 288,000 people. In most cases, these are people who were moved
into Latvia while it was occupied by the Soviet Union and thus could not
qualify for citizenship under international law.

Many of these people are loyal to Latvia
but resent the idea that they should have to apply for citizenship rather than
gain it automatically, Yermolayeva says. But intriguingly she adds that such
people are in some ways “the most privileged” group in the region because they
have the right to travel freely in Europe and without a visa to Russia.

“In
neighboring Estonia,” the Moscow journalist continues, “the number of ‘non-citizens’
is lower than in Latvia” – only seven percent of the population is in that
category. But at the same time, the number of Russian citizens is higher” –
seven percent according to the Baltic Institute for Social Science.

The reason for this difference in the balance
of persons without citizenship and those with Russian citizenship, the Moscow
journalist continues, is a product of different decisions of the two countries
in the 1990s. But it has important consequences: in Estonia, there are no “powerful
and independent Russian-language political parties,” but in Latvia, there are.

Staunton, September 28 – The Russian
occupation authorities not only have imposed “systematic discrimination”
against the Crimean Tatar people but have conducted mass searches against them
and their institutions and organized or looked the other way in cases of
kidnaping and disappearances, according to Refat Chubarov, the head of the
Crimean Tatar Mejlis.

Russian officials like Foreign
Minister Sergey Lavrov say, Chubarov wrote in his blog today, that the Crimean
Tatars have all the rights other “citizens of the Russian Federation” have and
that he has “not heard about any serious problems.” But reports about such “problems”
are available to anyone who is willing to listen (echo.msk.ru/blog/chubarov_refat/1408454-echo/).

On Saturday evening local time, two
young Crimean Tatars were abducted by unknown assailants and have
disappeared.Their families and friends immediately
informed the force structures, the police and the FSB who said they would check
but apparently have done nothing of the kind, Chubarov said.

But given that “the FSB has
established total control over all society” and follows “practically every
resident of Crimea,” the Crimean Tatar leader said, it is impossible to believe
that the Russian occupiers couldn’t say who had committed this latest act of
force against the Crimean Tatars.

And yet another reason for skepticism about Russian
statements concerning the rights and protection of the Crimean Tatars, Chubarov
continued, is the protection the occupiers have been given to the illegal actions
of the self-proclaimed “detachments of ‘Crimean Self-Defense.’”As a result of this pattern, he said, Crimean
society is being subjected ever more to real terror.

Staunton, September 28 – Given that
Russians increasingly have “ceased to believe” in scholarship and turned to conspiracy
theories of one kind or another, Boris Kagarlitsky says, it is perhaps not
surprising that many of them including many in the Russian government have accepted
the latest example of such theories, that of “administered chaos.”

And like so many other such
theories, the director of the Moscow Institute of Globalization and Social
Movements says, they have “borrowed” it from the West where this notion has “periodically
surfaced in the writing of both left-wing and right-wing radicals” (rabkor.ru/likbez/2014/09/25/myth-of-controlled-chaos).

But as also often happened, he continues, in “a
paradoxical way,” in Russia the notion of “administered chaos” has been taken
up primarily by conservatives and other defenders of the existing order, who
have repeated it so often that others have fallen under its influence typically
with sad consequences.

The
concept is simple in the extreme, he says, which may account for its
popularity.According to its backers, “the
United States, now in crisis, is trying to compensate for its weakness by
destabilizing the rest of the world.” But by some miracle, the US is “always
able to preserve control over the situation” and use it to Washington’s
advantage.

For
Russian exponents of this view, “the most dangerous form of chaos and
destabilization” consists of revolutions, but because they believe that, they
fail to distinguish between revolutions which spring from the state of any
particular society and those which are sponsored from outside.As a result, for them, “all revolutions” are created
by the US.

Of
course, Kagarlitsky says, there is some evidence for this notion. If there
weren’t, no one would accept it. But there is a fundamental problem: much of
the instability in the world reflects factors other than American influence,
and the US often isn’t able to deal with that any better than anyone else. In
fact, for Washington, things are becoming “ever more difficult.”

Some
Western writers but few Russian ones have suggested that “there are objective
limits” to administered chaos. But while that may be true, “chaos as such never
was administered in the sense in which conspiracy theorists have understood it.”
It is possible to “influence” chaos, “at times quite effectively,” but it is
impossible to do so in entirely predictable ways.

If
the situations were otherwise, they would not be chaos, Kagarlitsky points out.

What
in fact the US has been doing, he suggests, is pursuing a foreign policy that is
intended to reduce to a minimum the problems disorder can cause for the United
States. That policy has two principles: “‘empires
have no permanent friends only continuing interests’” and “‘one must not put
all one’s eggs in one basket.’”

Washington
shifted to that approach at the end of the 1970s, copying much of it from the
British.Instead of saying it will
defend anyone “to the last” in the name of fighting communism, the US began to
bob and weave, backing now one side and then another as the balance of strength
shifted.

At
present, this flexibility reflects the combination of two principles,
Kagarlitsky says. On the one hand, Washington is prepared to “support any
authoritarian regime” in the name of fighting terrorism. But on the other, it
has not given up the idea of promoting “more democracy” anywhere or restricting
itself as to “the ways and means” of doing so.

The British did this with great
success, but the Americans have done so with much less, he continues. The
reason is that “the present-day American State Department does not have either the
experience of that diplomatic culture which was always characteristic for the
British foreign office.”

“The foreign policy of the British
Empire, even while being extremely cynical, permitted it to maintain its
reputation while avoiding accusations of a complete lack of principles,” the
Moscow analyst says. The Americans have been much less successful in that
regard.Their “imperialism” simply isn’t
as skillful as that of the British in the past.

As a result, he says, the US has
suffered “practically an uninterrupted series of defeats in all directions of
world policy,” but because of its “unprincipled flexibility and willingness
constantly to change allies and spend enormous sums,” Washington often has been
able to conceal its losses, especially among those who believe in the doctrine
of administered chaos.

This can’t go on forever,
Kagarlitsky says, and he suggests that “it is completely possible that
precisely the events which are taking place now in Ukraine and in Russia will
in this sense prove to be a turning point” which Russians will be able to see
if they give up their fascination with conspiracy theories.